Chen, Xiaodong

Xiaodong Chen is assistant professor of geography at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He is a Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard's Center for International Development.

Chen is interested in human-environment interactions for biodiversity conservation. He received a PhD in Systems Modeling from the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, at Michigan State University in 2010. He holds an M.Sc in Applied Statistics from Michigan State University, an M.Sc in Geographic Information Science from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Acedemy of Sciences, and a B.Sc in Urban and Environmental Sciences from Peking University. His dissertation research addresses complex interactions among policies, people, and wildlife habitat in China's Wolong Nature Reserve. Specific research topics include human responses to government policies under different social contexts, spatial targeting in conservation investments for ecosystem services, impacts of human activities on habitat dynamics, and agent-based modeling of complex interactions among policies, people, and wildlife habitat.